Comment by silveroriole | Hacker News Reader

Comment by silveroriole | Hacker News Reader

I still post on a forum and it’s the only place on the internet I feel has any sort of community. Reddit and Facebook groups are just newbies/morons posting the same newbie/moron questions over and over again; or instagram-lite (everything upvoted is a nice photo).

From talking with people, it seems they feel put off by forums and especially long-running threads because they worry anything they have to contribute will already have been posted before, and they don’t know if it’s ok to join an ongoing conversation. They don’t want to annoy people or look silly. In other words, they don’t feel encouraged to post spammy newbie crap, and they’re aware they’re posting to other people instead of to an algorithmic void. Too bad they don’t see that as an advantage instead of a barrier.

e: btw, no matter what tech you use, you will find it very difficult to create a community by encouraging feed-style posting (where you ‘express yourself’ in a wide broadcast to nobody in particular). This drives high-volume, low-quality engagement (which is why fb, twitter, tumblr, instagram etc use it), not high-quality human interaction.

I joined SA in '03. A few years later when Reddit launched, I rejected the "hierarchical" nature of Reddit posts, multiple posters having their own conversations in different parts of the same post just seemed harder to keep track of, similar to an email chain with new people joining and replying to different parts of the chain. SA's threads were, and still are, non-hierarchical.

At some point something interesting started happening, at least in the sub-forums I participate in. So called "megathreads" started gobbling up what would have been new threads, e.g. the "Python questions that don't deserve their own thread" thread. It was (and still is) enough to simply bookmark individual megathreads of interest, rather than the sub-forum itself. It was as if the megathread itself had become hyper-specific forums in their own right.

I see megathreads now as slow-moving asynchronous chat rooms, with a good membership mixture of regulars and newcomers. The pace agrees with me.

I cannot begin to quantify the impact SA has had in my life. Anytime I'm remotely interested in something I can generally find some big thread talking about it. There is occasionally a bit of groupthink, but for the most part you generally just find a really great group of people willing to help.

I have no idea if it would feel like that to outsiders just joining though, given that it's so different from any other modern forum.

+1

I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.

> I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly.

Which forum?

There's a hint in the parent comment.

vBulletin was first launched in 2000.

From circlefavshape:

> +1

> I joined a forum in 1999 and still read it daily and post regularly. It's changed an awful lot over the years, but it is and has been for a long time an actual community, even though these days I know v few of the people on it in real life.

Hacker News? Otherwise, the hint went over my head.

> I still post on a forum and it’s the only place on the internet I feel has any sort of community.

What forum?

SA. I’ve been using it for, god, I dunno, 15 years? But I don’t think many HN posters will fit in.

There's an entire thread on SA for mocking HN, so I think you're right.

Muggle Of Glob, that's a lot of animated avatars. It's like watching an aneurysm in real time.

Is that still going? I used to lurk but didn't bother posting because of the sign up fee, and then I sort of assumed it went to poo poo with all the other big forums from the Silver Age of the internet. How has the culture fared in this post-GamerGate world?

> SA.

Something Awful for the uninitiated.

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